The Human Brain is so COOL! Part 1: Sense of Smell

Have you ever smelled something, and suddenly you remembered something from a long time ago that you had completely forgotten about. The smell itself triggered that memory in your brain to resurface. The memories can be very old, and they can be very, very powerful.

Last night, the t.v. show Modern Family  was all about the extended family celebrating Mother's Day. Jay, the patriarch of the family, decided to make a special recipe that he loved that his mom had made for him as a kid. At the end of the episode, he took a big wiff of the delicious dinner, and it made him cry. The smell of the dinner triggered powerful memories of his mom and  and the happy times he had with her.

Your sense of smell can be a very powerful trigger of memories. But how? And why? After all, the part of your brain that detects smells is very close to your nose but not close to the places where memories are stored.

The sense of smell is one of the most basic processes in the human body as well as other animals, yet our understanding of how your brain captures molecules and translates that into something that your brain recognizes as a smell is cutting edge science. In 2004, Richard Axel and  Linda Buck won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their groundbreaking work in how the sense of smell works. That just goes to show that there are plenty of basic things about science that we still don't understand very well, even things that are so basic to the human experience.

Here's a link to Richard Axel's Nobel Prize lecture.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2004/axel-lecture.html
And here's one for Linda Buck's Nobel Prize lecture.
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/2004/buck-lecture.html

There's a lot going on in the small space that a human nose takes up I like using Google Chrome's interactive   You can adjust what you see, adding and removing the cardiovascular and nervous system, as well as human organs. You can even fade any of the three so the system is visible but not so much that it blocks your view of other features. You have to download Google Chrome to use this tool.
http://www.google.com/chrome/thankyou.html?hl=en&brand=CHMI&oneclickinstalled=&statcb=&installdataindex=defaultbrowser

Once Chrome is installed, you can click here to access Google Body.
http://bodybrowser.googlelabs.com/

In my next post, I hope to talk a bit more about how the brain stores memories, then I'll tackle how scents trigger those memories.

Other resources for images of the nasal system:
A very detailed set of slides showing the anatomy of a nose can be found at this site by Kansas State University.  http://faculty.ksu.edu.sa/yousryelsayed/Atlas%20ENT%20teaching%20slides/Atlas%20Anatomy%20of%20the%20nose%20and%20paranasal%20sinuses.pdf

If you'd like to see some images that are more appropriate for younger children, The Children's Hospital Boston has some good images that separate the sinuses from the rest of the nasal system (olfactory).
http://www.childrenshospital.org/az/Site1366/mainpageS1366P0.html